The Goethe Dictionary.

Gero Schliess reports on what the title accurately calls a “mammoth task”:

Precisely 70 years ago, the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin initiated the huge project of the Goethe dictionary – a lexicon precisely listing, describing and explaining every single word used by Goethe in his poems, dramas, letters, official writings and scientific essays.

In his speech on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the initiative, project manager Michael Niedermeier of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) said that back then, the time was ripe for this project.

Following the Nazi era, people were yearning for the imperturbable values epitomized by Goethe and his era. At the time, nobody could have imagined that the project would go on over several generations, including the reunification of Germany.

It took more than 20 years just to list and evaluate these 93,000 words. But now, an end is in sight. In terms of lexical evaluation, the present team consisting of 17 academics has reached the letters S and T. It is hoped that the project will be completed in 2025. Originally, the researchers had the year 2040 in mind. However, the patience and the budget of the BBAW and of the academies in Heidelberg and Göttingen cooperating with it turned out to be limited after all.

Michael Niedermeier says the dictionary, whose website is here, is a “central instrument of exploring Classicism, and it will take decades and centuries until its full effect will be realized.” Hyperbolic, perhaps, but surely one is permitted a bit of proud hyperbole when discussing a project like this. Thanks, Trevor!

Comments

Maybe this doesn’t help with the “explaining” but I would think that a rather important development over the seventy years is the development of technology to the point where it ought to be a quick and straightforward exercise to get digital versions of the best available texts of pretty much everything Goethe ever wrote, load them into a single database, press a few buttons, and get a complete concordance, equivalent in detail to that that was probably generated by hand over the course of the first few decades of the project.

In the spring of ’84, my particular section of a college-freshman English class was reading Ulysses, and we were given an assignment that required going to the library, getting hold of a hard-copy concordance of it (the university owned multiple copies) and picking a particularly striking word, tracing it through the book, and then ruminating about its various usages. Now it’s easy to find free searchable online concordances of Ulysses, but it took a while to use the internet to find evidence of the prior existence of hand-generated hard-copy ones. I’m not actually 100% sure if the one I was able to find a few references to (originally done by Miles Hanley at the U. of Wisconsin in the 1930’s and then revised after his death to match up with a revised edition of Ulysses) is the one we used. Hanley (1893-1954) also worked during the ’30’s on the Linguistic Atlas of New England, so he was a scholar of wide-ranging interests.

Should rather be called “philosophy of nature”. Goethe refused to follow the evidence to such philosophically unappealing conclusions like white being a mixture instead of pure purity.

Martin Luther, by comparison, “only” commanded 23,000 words.

Ah, that was partly deliberate. Luther wasn’t trying to write poetry or philosophy, he was trying to render the Bible and his own religious musings in 1) as plain language as possible, 2) using words that would be as widely understood as possible. That imposes a least-common-denominator effect on his life’s work.

What do they mean by “word”? German concept of a word is quite extendable.

I suppose ad-hoc compounds that wouldn’t go into another dictionary aren’t in this one either.

For words like that, though, it’s really functioning more as a concordance than a dictionary. The entry for “Abendhimmel,” for example, doesn’t bother to define the word but it does reveal that Goethe once used it as a rhyme for “Bim-Baum-Bimmel” in one of the great classics of Western literature.

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